We came across Mr. and Mrs. Clauses from a closing vintage store and saw the opportunity to use these as an engaging interactive piece at an annual Christmas Party thrown for Children without families. This real world subject, and moving application made the project irresistible.

First we had to undress Mr. and Mrs. Clause to see what makes the tick. LITERALLY, we need to reinvent how they move and give them voices!

For starters we made Mr. and Mrs. Clause ONE by combining all four motors onto the wooden armature that was Mr. Clause. We took that wooden armature and made it into one TREE. This means the movement of the tree is more dynamic. It has a swiveling head, a twisting torso, an arm the rotates horizontally, and another arm which rotates vertically.


The next step getting the movements to be activated by a sensor.

The key to this is the power switch tail from sparkfun. this power tail allows hacking into regular plugged objects to easily intervene with an arduino and a sensor! http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9842

Sensors:

Some ideas that didn’t work out

Infrared led , proximity sensor, over all with the texture of the tree this sensor was just too sensitive and made the movement jittery and sporadic.
torsos. We went with the Ultrasonic Range Finder from sparkfun.